Author Archives: ehwfram

About ehwfram

I am an artist living in Vermont, inspired by the day-to-day details of life.

Enjoying the Ride

Last July I started experimenting with a new approach to my dyed and stitched pieces.
Flipping the coin from the way I’d been working, I started embroidering the imagery with white silk thread first, and then dyed the cloth afterward using a new stitched-resist method that I had begun experimenting with at the Vermont Studio Center in April.

My hope was that the silk thread would absorb the color and pattern of the dye process, leaving the image to some degree camouflaged while still maintaining its visual strength. I wanted the viewer to be drawn in by the pattern and to discover the imagery upon closer inspection. Unfortunately, the results were decidedly unsatisfactory because the image became almost completely lost. It shows more clearly below because the angle of the photo catches the light to its advantage.
To jog your memory, check back to my post “Committing to a Process of Search” to read about my initial stab at this new process.

After working my way through the more recent lobster piece (my second attempt at this idea), I returned to the original this week with new thoughts on ways to salvage it from its ghost-like appearance.

While there are elements of the process I’d like to tweak, I am definitely making progress toward my initial objective. And more importantly, as I work back and forth between the stitches and the pattern they sit upon, I’m really enjoying the ride. For lack of a better way of describing it, there’s a satisfying rhythm to considering both image and surface, puzzling out a way to bounce between the two so that they can simultaneously work together and independently, with neither being overwhelmed by the other.

Meanwhile, serendipity happened in the form of Neil Gaiman’s 2012 University of the Arts commencement address “Make Good Art”.
The thing about a good graduation speech is that it’s just as inspiring to everyone else in the audience as it is to the graduates…maybe even more so because being older provides the benefit of life experience as a measuring stick. Gaiman’s advice resonates loudly and clearly in its encouragement to make mistakes and to keep trying.

If you too are attempting to gain some traction in your current work, give it a listen and see if it doesn’t give you a boost.

Cloth Lullaby

Whenever we travel, sooner or later we usually end up in a local bookshop. Just as with small storefronts that sell fabric, book stores are one of the few strongholds of regional retail that have held onto their individuality in an environment of homogeneous big-box stores and online shopping. As a result, browsing unfamiliar shelves has become another form of travel adventure for me.

Cloth Lullaby Cover

With that in mind, visiting Book Passage in San Francisco’s Ferry Building a year and a half ago didn’t disappoint. If you can get there, they have a really interesting selection of art-related books, which is an attraction that holds true for their children’s section as well. Children’s book illustrations always pull me in and, I’ll admit it, I do judge a book by its cover. And it’s such a bonus that, if the spirit moves, I can read one cover-to-cover on the spot.

“Louise was raised by a river. Her family lived in a big house on the water that wove like a wool thread through everything.”

My favorite discovery at Book Passage was Cloth Lullaby – The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois, written by Amy Novesky and with lovely illustrations by Isabelle Arsenault. It is a gem meant for the younger set that holds plenty of spark for adults as well. It was a great day when I found I could borrow a copy via our inter-library loan.

“And when Louise was twelve years old, she learned the trade, too, drawing in the missing fragments of a tapestry. It was often the bottoms of these fabric pictures that got the most wear and were most in need of repair, and so Louise became adept at drawing feet. Drawing was like a thread in a spider’s web.”

I won’t bother with a full recap*. Rather, what I’d most like to share with you is the capacity this book has to inspire budding artists. There are so many ways that it might capture a young imagination…it surely inspired this not-so-young one! The pictures are magical while the text is brief but equally as illustrative. It is a lyrical biography that demonstrates the power of art, stressing the strength which textile-related metaphors held over Bourgeois’ art throughout her long life.

Maman ©1999 Louise Bourgeois, 30.5 x 29.25 x 33.5 feet, Stainless steel, bronze, and marble. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa As you will read in Cloth Lullaby, Bourgeois often returned to the theme of spiders as a representation of her mother – a repairer of broken things. “The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.” – Louise Bourgeois

Novesky’s biographical notes at the end of the book answer many of the questions about Bourgeois that are bound to crop up for young and older readers alike. They also provide a stepping stone toward grasping the importance of exploration when making art, serving as an important acknowledgement of the fluid possibilities an art practice might take by demonstrating the variety of forms it could conceivably evolve into or through as a career develops.

That’s a lot of potential packed between the covers of these 40 beautiful pages!

More:
This 10 minute video: Louise Bourgeois | HOW TO SEE the artist with MoMA Chief Curator Emerita Deborah Wye is a wonderful overview of Bourgeois’ work. Wye talks specifically about Bourgeois’ textile works at about the halfway point of the video.

*Read Brain Pickings’ review of Cloth Lullaby for a more in-depth exploration of the book and its illustrations.

Lisette ©2018 Elizabeth Fram, 24 x 18 inches, Graphite on paper With only graphite, I couldn’t begin to do justice to the vibrant colors and jewelry our model wore this week. At least I have the memory.

Update
Happily, Salley Mavor’s show, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, will not go unseen. The New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, MA will be hosting the exhibition, entitled Liberty and Justice: The Satirical Art of Salley Mavor. It will be on display at the museum September 26 – December 30, 2018 and at the Cotuit Center for the Arts in Cotuit, MA March 2 – April 20, 2019. Good news all around!

Another Week

I love reading about how other artists organize and manage their practice and in that spirit thought I would share the variety of things I’ve been working on Monday through Wednesday of this week. If for no other reason, it’ll show you that I usually toggle back and forth between several things at once.

Monday = life drawing and whatever else I can squeeze in.

I post this blog on Thursdays. It publishes immediately but is sent out through the wonders of Mailchimp to my mailing list at 4am on Friday mornings. This is why those of you who have subscribed can read it with your morning coffee every week. I have found that setting up and keeping a schedule is the key ingredient that has allowed me to post consistently each week for almost four years. And while my schedule of stitching and drawing is a little more flexible, it is the same devotion to consistency that results in a sense of accomplishment.

This week that “squeezed in” Monday project was working on the lobster piece

I try not to think too much about the next week’s post over the weekend other than to keep my eyes and ears open for new ideas. But each week unfolds the same way: Mondays are for entertaining various possibilities for that week’s post, Tuesdays I compose a draft, Wednesdays are devoted to polishing, and I publish on Thursday. Depending on the week, any of those steps can run very smoothly or be quite laborious, which makes it easy to see how blog-writing has become an all-consuming profession for some.

Tuesday = the start of a new drawing and the final touches on the lobster piece which will still need to be framed.

I started Eye of the Needle as a means of better articulating my practice and of opening the door to a conversation with other artists and with anyone who might be interested in what goes on behind my artistic curtain, so to speak. It has given back to me more than I could have imagined on both counts.

One unexpected discovery is that the time spent writing often spurs ideas for the practical side of whatever I’m currently working on, and while I’m stitching I can sometimes work out the wrinkles of my post that week. Drawing is in a whole different league though because it requires being constantly engaged in the process at hand, with moment by moment decisions necessary.

Wednesday = experimenting to create a shaped resisted area before folding, stitching and dyeing a new piece. The shape below is cut from cotton cloth, and I stitched a duplicate directly underneath it on the other side of the silk – hoping that since cotton won’t absorb the dyes I use that I might have at least the shadow of this shape remaining after stitching and dyeing the silk.

Cotton resist basted in place

Piece folded, stitched, and dyed. The lighter area is the cotton which has barely absorbed any of the dye

The results didn’t turn out anything like I hoped – let alone expected. I’m thinking now about my next move.

The images of this week’s work are an example of the variety of things I’m juggling at any given time. Believe it or not, they all feed into each other, although sometimes I wish my various disciplines developed in a straighter line. As you can perhaps imagine, sometimes my practice feels a bit disjointed, but I have come to understand and trust how the three legs of the stool – writing, drawing, and stitching – have become equally necessary to each other.

My son just gave me a copy of the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. I’m looking forward to seeing what ideas it may have to help me to pull these elements together more tightly.

Maine-ly Art

Art and travel go hand in hand, which is one of the reasons I’m always happy when I can get back to Maine.

School Street mural, Rockland, Maine

Akin to the sight of white pines backed by azure skies and the smell of salt in the air, many of Andrew Wyeth’s images speak to me as an indelible representation of the state where I grew up. PBS recently added an episode on Wyeth to their American Masters series; it’s quite good and addresses the often uneasy sense of mystery that hovers in the stark beauty and loneliness found in many of his paintings. I can’t speak to any connection those from Pennsylvania may feel toward his Chadds Ford work, but for me, Wyeth got Maine exactly right.

Olson House, Cushing, Maine

Although I visited the outside of the Olson house (the forbidding clapboard farmhouse that anchors Wyeth’s iconic Christina’s World) as a child, one can now see the inside as well thanks to the Farnsworth Art Museum assuming ownership in the early 1990’s.

Hathorn / Olson Graveyard looking out to Maple Juice Cove, Cushing, Maine

The ‘tour’ that comes with admission is really a half-hour history of the house and its generations of inhabitants — a single family line — told to wonderful effect by a local docent. With dramatic pauses and a spooky affect that gave the impression of a cross between a no-nonsense schoolmarm and a wicked witch, she relayed how the original settlers were descendents of John Hathorne, the notorious chief justice of the Salem witch trials. They came to Maine in the 1700’s seeking to escape the tainted shadow Hathorne left upon the family name. Our docent capitalized on that air of eeriness with tales that encompassed deprivation, childhood death, and of course Christina’s disability.

Front Room, Olson House

Afterward we were free to roam the house which has remained as it was when Christina and her brother Alvaro lived there, and as it appears in many of Wyeth’s paintings. It’s an other-worldly experience walking into rooms that are hauntingly familiar, immersed in the same sense of place and light depicted by Wyeth, looking through the frames of windows he depicted to the views he recorded with a combination of faithfulness and artistic license.

Roofline, Olson House, no doubt the vantage from which End of Olson’s was painted in 1969.

Much has been said about Wyeth’s place in the lexicon of American painting, and I’m not going to debate that here. For me, his superior draughtsmanship, emotionally charged brevity, and compositional fluency negate any question of merit. But beyond those attributes, his paintings speak to a sense of Maine that anyone with a strong connection to the state would recognize, a quality that makes his work so intimately relatable.

If you’d like to dig a little deeper on the subject, let me recommend Christina Baker Kline’s novel A Piece of the World, a wonderful first-person portrayal of Christina Olson’s life inspired by her circumstances and her relationship with Andrew and Betsy Wyeth.

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©Abe Goodale, Watercolor

On a more contemporary note, I was thrilled to walk into the Archipelago Store and Gallery of the Island Institute in Rockland and to discover an exhibit of wonderful paintings of lobstermen by Abe Goodale. On his website Goodale notes this series, the Eastern Waters project, is a tribute to the hardworking lobstermen of Penobscot Bay and that he “set out to capture a way of life, a generation upon the water and an industry that is thriving, yet fragile”. I think it’s remarkable how sensitively he portrays the toughness surrounding these men and their work.
I regret the quality of my photos is so poor.

Pause ©Abe Goodale

Sea Smoke ©Abe Goodale, Watercolor

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And finally, because I believe censorship is wrong, I am sharing a link to textile artist Salley Mavor’s recent story of being forced, ten days before the opening, to withdraw from her solo exhibition Liberty and Justice: New Artwork by Salley Mavor. The show had been in coordinated planning for a year.

In relating the circumstances, Mavor is careful not to cast aspersions on the organization/venue, its staff or volunteers. I truly hope you will take the time to read what she has to say. It is not a political rant, it is a measured response to where we find ourselves in society today. She says, “For me, the work is about stepping away from a safe, sheltered existence and into a very real reality, one where there is possibility for action toward making a difference in the world.”
I want to honor her request that links to her work be shared in order for it to be seen. Maybe you will too. It is so important that we work together to subvert censorship and support artistic freedom.

Regardless of your political stance , please take the time to explore Mavor’s website. Her work is beautiful, and if you share a love of nature, I’m sure you will find it both magical and delightful. Her creativity and skill with a needle are remarkable.

Many thanks to Eve Jacobs-Carnahan for bring this to my attention.

Indomitable Self

Reclamation, the spectacular exhibit of portraits at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe this summer, closed last weekend. As a parting shot, Margaret Bowland, one of the exhibiting artists, gave a wonderful talk — easily one of the most engaging I’ve ever attended.

Bowland’s piece in the show, a young African-American girl covered in white paint, spurs difficult questions, especially as our country continues to struggle with its racial history and its ongoing disparities — open sores that show little sign of permanent healing. Could she really be depicting this youngster in white face?

But as is often the case, there is a greater narrative that lies below the surface. This quote from the Helen Day’s Gallery Guide of the exhibition clarifies Bowman’s self-imposed directive.

Margaret Bowland’s large-scale portraits attempt to untangle power. As the artist explains, “when making works I have often covered my subject in paint to make this point. I feel that I am doing what the world does to my subjects, tries to obliterate them or turn them into people they are not. For me, the victory is that my people stare back at you completely themselves. No matter the costume or the make up you are looking at an individuated and very real, human being. They have, or are learning to survive through what the world has thrown at them.”

The depth of Bowland’s art, careful layers of insight portraying questions of identity and ‘self’ through the lens of social and political mores, encompasses both her personal history growing up in North Carolina and her deep understanding of art history. She is a dynamic teacher, and her talk last week shed light on her brilliant ability to synthesize difficult and diverse questions of what it is like to be “other” through a portal of empathy, all the while rooting her work within the realities of history, both the history of art and history in general. I am envious of her students’ access to her theoretical and practical knowledge.

Please take some time to study the paintings on her website and to read her artist’s statement, which is an abridged version of the talk she gave. You too will be impressed.

Copycatting

I sorely miss my group life-drawing sessions which have been on hiatus for five weeks. Figuring I didn’t have to factor in drive-time, I had high hopes for all the drawing I would accomplish during those extra hours over the break…wait, what extra hours? In fact, looking back on my recent “free” Mondays, it has become starkly obvious that the structure of a set schedule is a better formula for accomplishment in the long run — for me anyway.

Copy from Studies of Two Apostles and their Hands by Raphael (1483-1520) Hands are my greatest challenge, so that is where I need to concentrate my efforts.

I know I could make much greater leaps in my life-drawing skills if I were able to draw from a model daily for a series of weeks, rather than only once a week for however many months. Unfortunately, that option isn’t available. However, one of my fellow Monday drawing attendees reminded me that there is much to be learned by making copies of master drawings. So that is what I’ve been doing.

Copy of drawings by Abraham Bloemaert (1564-1651)

Considering the garden is popping and there have been plenty of other things vying for attention during my “extra” hours, I haven’t been as diligent as I should have — or certainly to the degree I would have liked. But these images are a few examples of my stabs at practicing, thanks to the work of Raphael, Abraham Bloemaert, and Bernard-Romain Julien. Jon deMartin’s book Drawing Atelier: The Figure is another excellent resource about copying master work. Follow this link for a list of drawing references I’ve mentioned before and am glad to have in my personal library.

Copy of Head of Wounded Soldier by Bernard-Romain Julien (1802-1871)

For another testimonial on the benefits of copying, read this wonderful blog post by Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist.

Not There Yet

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” ~Thomas Edison

I wish I could say, after all the folding, stitching, and dyeing of the lobster piece this past week, that I was completely blown away by the success of my results once all the resist stitches were painstakingly picked out. But sadly, that isn’t the way it turned out.

Come out, come out, wherever you are

While I’m very happy with the shibori pattern that developed, and I’m grateful for figuring out how to seat the image within that pattern, it’s a huge disappointment that the embroidered lobster image has become completely lost and is now practically invisible. It’s a ghost lobster, if you will. Somehow I have to puzzle out how to illustrate the idea of ‘hidden in plain sight’, but it will have to include the one thing that is sorely missing, the root of my misstep: contrast.
I’m headed back to the drawing board.

Ghost Lobster

In the very beginning of my shibori journey, I came up against a similar brick wall. Some of you may have heard me tell about the first piece from my Dog Walk series – where I used stitched-resist to define the silhouette shadow. I undid those resist stitches with the same level of anticipation, only to be sorely deflated at the unremarkable results.

But after letting the piece simmer for a bit, I hit on the idea to break up the space with a grid of color by layering textile paint on top of the shibori image. This was followed by defining both the grid and the image with stitch. It not only solved my immediate problem, but also started me down this path I’ve been happily following for the past several years: combining shibori patterns with embroidered images.

So, I haven’t lost heart; I’ll figure something out. Challenges are a good thing – and in the meantime the process will give me something to write about in the weeks to come.

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The most interesting thing I learned about this week was the work of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). Entomologist, botanical artist, and naturalist, she was the first person to record metamorphosis, documenting and illustrating the life cycles of 186 insect species throughout her life. Her classification of butterflies and moths is apparently still in use today.
Check out the link above to get an idea of the height of her mastery.

Illuminated Copper-engraving from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Plate VI. 1705 by Maria Sibylla Merian

She created volumes of spectacular botanical illustrations. They were painted in watercolor because, as a woman, the guilds of her time wouldn’t allow her to use oil paints. In 1699, at the age of 52, she traveled to the Dutch colony of Surinam so she could sketch the animals, plants, and insects there. Her journey was remarkable for the fact that she was able to undertake it in the first place, and all the more so because it was sponsored by the city of Amsterdam.

Plate 1 from Metamorphosis in Surinam by Maria Sibylla Merian

Everything else aside, with the heat we’ve experienced this week, can you imagine traveling to and working in the tropics dressed in the many long layers of dress worn by women in 17th century?
And on another note, I wonder if Merian’s work was inspiration for Mary Delany? It must have been.

Leap of Faith

Do you remember this piece from several weeks ago? I am taking what I learned from it and trying again with the goal of figuring out how to portray something “hidden in plain sight” — a stitched image that is camouflaged within shibori patterning while remaining visible.

Another challenge is deciding what the shibori pattern will be so that it works together with the shape of the image, not against it.

This time I’m using my lobster drawing from a couple of weeks ago as a jumping-off point. I sewed the stitches as densely as I could, trusting their solidity would make it possible for the image to hold its own in relation to the visual strength of the dyed pattern that is yet to come.

The rectangular stitched area is 6 x 9 inches. The background stitches were added to set the image apart from the rest of the cloth, hopefully helping the lobster to stand out once the shibori pattern is in place.

In reading Young Yang Chung’s Painting with a Needle, I’ve learned that Asian embroiderers commonly placed various kinds of padding underneath areas to be embroidered in order to achieve a three-dimensional effect. Perhaps creating a relief-like form will give this lobster the oomph it needs to mingle and co-exist with the dyed pattern, each with its own voice, but neither overpowering the other.

I used both batting and heavy silk thread to pad the lobster, some areas more heavily than others. I think it adds something of a sculptural effect. The process is very reminiscent of trapunto.

The middle image in this post shows the completed embroidery. The next step will be a huge leap of faith as I move forward with the dye process. I hope what I have to show you next week will be a happy outcome, or at least a step in the right direction. For now I am cautiously optimistic.

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Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life both hold a place on my “favorites shelf”. I return to them from time to time for inspiration, encouragement, and solace. Writers may write about writing, but for the most part the wisdom they share can be directly translated to any form of creative work. It’s just that they’re, well, writers, so they have a knack for making the information both inspirational and accessible.

I will be pushing the above two books closer together to make room for Ann Patchett’s The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life, which I read this past week. It has earned its spot next to the others. At 45 pages, it’s short, to the point, and so very worth your time if you’re interested in such things.

The Other Side

In this technology-driven and divided world, exactly how much relevance can the art of fabric and thread expect to maintain?

Last week Antrese Wood of the Savvy Painter podcast talked with realist portrait artist Cayce Zavaglia, whose medium just happens to be embroidery. The interview didn’t disappoint. The nuggets of information and wisdom shared surrounding Zavaglia’s process, the content of her work, the way she balances her workday with raising four children, and how she migrated from paint to working with thread, encapsulate the particulars I am eager to learn about any artist. So much of what she has to say directly resonates, and boy, what I would have given to have heard this discussion 20 years ago!

As she often does, Wood asked Zavaglia if she could share a time when she experienced a particular challenge in her practice and what she learned from that occurrence. Zavaglia responded that she now actively seeks failures and mistakes in her work, noting that failure is often a closer link to creativity than success because, while riding on one’s success can be great, it can also be a creativity suppressor, making it easier to pigeonhole and compartmentalize the work by inhibiting further exploration and discoveries.

The pivotal moment Zavaglia related involved a work that contained a section she had reworked over and over in an effort to get the mouth just right. By continually removing threads she had compromised the integrity of the linen ground, resulting in a distorted image. The piece was exhibited but she was never happy with it, and afterward pulled it from circulation, keeping it in her studio for a couple of years, face to the wall.

During that time she became more and more engaged with the back of the piece — its knots and messy tangle of threads — finally arriving at the epiphany to reframe it in reverse. In doing so, the original distortion seemed to disappear as it was now shielded from direct light by the shadowbox of the frame. She displayed the piece on a pedestal so that both sides were visible, with the “back” side now considered the “right” side. It was the first work that sold from that show.

Zavaglia says that while the portrait was an obvious failure, with time and distance she was able to find the beauty in the mistake. That discovery completely changed the trajectory of her studio practice, such that now the backside of her stitched imagery is integral in both her embroidered pieces and her paintings.

The point I found most enlightening is that in searching for the relevance of her stitched family portraits in the grander scheme of the art world, Zavaglia realized that these back images represent a portrayal of the hidden side of ourselves that we all possess but don’t often expose. Referencing the emotional impact of Anthony Bourdain’s and Kate Spade’s suicides, she acknowledges the parts of us which are messy and tangled and human, and the importance of being aware that they exist despite outward appearances to the contrary.

In that light, to answer my original question, I can’t think of a more appropriate medium than fabric and thread to make such an impactful statement about the effects of contemporary life within our society today — politically, socially, and emotionally.

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And speaking of the relevance of embroidery: Did you read this article: “An Artist Unites North and South Korea, Stitch by Stitch”? Who says there isn’t power in the needle?

The Mighty Triangle

While color will often draw a person across a room to a work of art, composition is the key that then locks the viewer in place.

A whole new world cracked open during my first college art history survey course when the “science” of arrangement and placement, in almost mathematical terms, was revealed to me for the first time. Suddenly I began to understand why some pieces of art just seem to feel right, and others niggle like a tiny pebble in your shoe.

Lobster 1

After last week’s post, please understand that my head is still floating around in 15th century Italy.
Triangles developed as a compositional technique during the Renaissance, partially due to the shape’s inherent relationship to perspective and its implication of depth as artists began to understand how to depict ‘real’ space. Additionally, the shape was used as a reference to the Holy Trinity and as a symbolic mechanism — a point-up triangle representing ascension toward the spiritual world. It was a revelation for me during that long-ago class, to view slide after slide outlining examples of its use throughout art history: Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix, The Chess Players by Thomas Eakins, and The Iwo Jima Memorial sculpted by Felix de Weldon are just a few examples.

Lobster 2

At the Uffizi, because most people were flocked around Primavera and The Birth of Venus in the Botticelli room, I had plenty of elbow room and time to closely study Botticelli’s unfinished Adoration of the Magi, from 1500. If you squint you will see the not-so-subtle use of a triangle, superimposed over an “X”, which forms the mainstay of the piece’s composition. Once one becomes aware of it, it is really quite fascinating to see how Botticelli deliberately guides our eyes directly toward the Christ Child, amid and despite the relatively frenetic crowd of people and animals.

Adoration of the Magi Sandro Botticelli, 1500, Tempera on panel, 173 x 107.5 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

On a more contemporary note, inspired by the podcast Unspooled, (recommended earlier this summer), we re-watched Citizen Kane this past weekend. Since podcast hosts Amy Nicholson and Paul Sheer frequently referenced Roger Ebert’s expertise in their discussion of the movie, I watched a second time with Ebert’s voice-over commentary. The background details about the actors and the film’s production were moderately interesting, but what really grabbed my attention was the extent to which composition was a factor as Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland labored to flesh out Kane’s story on a visual level. Countless scenes were composed, and camera shots framed, such that the characters were placed into the classic device of a triangle, forcing sight lines between them and often a key object, while simultaneously influencing what we as viewers saw, albeit often subconsciously.

Lobster 3

So, looking at this week’s lobster drawing, I realize that at first glance it doesn’t form a true triangle, yet the shape is strongly suggested in this head-on view with the tail at the apex. I have to admit I didn’t plan it that way, but chose this view because it “just felt right” (see first paragraph). It’s a configuration that lends a sense of stability and weight to the drawing even though the image is floating in space, and I have to wonder how much influence all the art I saw in Florence, and perhaps even Citizen Kane, had on it’s making.

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For all you art/gardeners, take a look at James Golden’s beautiful View From Federal Twist. And if you have the time, treat yourself to this lovely NY Times article about Golden and his garden, in which he describes “…the main purpose of this garden is aesthetic, ornamental, even emotional”. It’s a wonderful end-of-day read.